Tag Archives: contemporary art

” … radiant and giving off a palpable … vibe, a kind of psychic heat, Heavy Sunshine, buzzing from the apian engine which drives it with the cosmic exigency which only derives from density, an immensely dense little star of positivity, happy imagery—flowers, mountains, clouds, houses, bees, bunnies, books, baseballs, brick facades, bananas, watermelon slices, apples and pineapples and mushrooms, computer monitors, keys, clocks, lampshades, pyramids, the majority made animate, all gaping eyes and content smiles stretching across their faces like cats in a sunbeam—condensing into a heavy star, loosed now and setting in to a dark sea obliterating, by virtue of its weight, all that lays before it, so long as any wavelength still finds its mark among the rods and cones … “

“The clouds spilling out of A retrospective view of the pathway are subject to an array of variables like wind, temperature, humidity, grass, and people that make even tumultuous modern life seem simple by comparison. The inherently fun yet hard-to-control foam is meant to celebrate the joy that can be found in change.”

“In the thin hallway gallery adjacent to the bulk of the show, prints made with the obsolete hectographic method—the kind used by the anti-colonial activists—use agar-agar, a common Asian dessert ingredient, to display English, Vietnamese and French iterations of the pro-immigration rallying cry “We are here because you were there.” The artist’s royal purple agitprop hangs over the observer’s heads like Damocles’ sword, a powerful reminder that history is written in blood and spoken through the gnashing of teeth. One leaves the show with eyes open, but blurred by now-knowing tears.”

” … what Green Stripes Event (so perfectly named!) does not look like, at first blush, is a painting; it’s obviously painted, of course—those stripes aren’t woven, didn’t come from nowhere—and has those various things a painting would have, where it to be broken down anatomically—and it is the protrusion, like a compound fracture, of the painting’s support, broken at the top, dangling at the bottom, which gives it both its injurious and closet-ready qualities, although the former is far more important, and keeping with the spirit of the show, than the latter—but it does not sit like a painting, compose itself as a painting should, back straight, belly tight, against the wall, a tidy lie, telling us that it exists in two dimensions … “

“In Life Review, Ben Murray’s solo show at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago, continues the artist’s reconnaissance of the maddeningly amorphous landscape of memory, here pinned to the walls in its most dramatic form. The “life review” is the classic, quasi-paranormal event wherein one’s life flashes before one’s eyes—in totality, crystal-clear—during a near death experience. A fictional trope and indelible fact to those who have experienced them, the life review is memory armed with the exigency of death, its celerity contrary to every little thing we imagine about ourselves—that we are some grand elegy in our total, that we are incapable of reduction to a series of scenes—when in fact we are, of course, nothing but scenes, none ever seen from the same perspective twice, singular in both our mind and the minds of others.”

In the hall outside the main space, an array of paint cans—actually wood, and liable to tip right over if one bumps them—sit on nightstands, surreal vignettes within and around them (a Hockney scene post-summer, leaves and furniture in a tiny empty pool in a drawer; a potato which wanders the wall like the world’s starchiest spider) suggesting the kind of sleep-deprivation-derived trompe l’oeilone gets in a dawn-lit bedroom after a prolonged coke binge, something just beyond the playfulness of his material alchemy and with the slightest soupçon of strange menace, the uncanny power of trompe l’esprit.

Conversations with artist and ACT UP videographer Rudy Lemcke—who has work in Art AIDS America—while living in the Bay Area first got [show curator Danny] Orendorff thinking about the intergenerational divide with the epidemic. For some, it was a war lived on the front lines, with the casualties to match; for others, a terrible but foggy memory of a tragic past. And for populations underserved by institutional efforts to treat HIV/AIDS, the epidemic has never really left, hanging on their eaves and haunting their communities.

” … perfect save a pox, the red of dried blood—it’s the brightest color in the whole room, really, this dried-deoxygenated-but-still-too-fresh blood, each splockwith its own idiosyncratic hair style, pili radiating as if from the weakest sun, clumping into constellations, gentle parabolic forms like arched eyebrows, carrying in them a sense of ad-hoc exigency, the kinetic beautiful violence requisite for their application demonstrated in their forms, an abstract take on a passage from a Bret Easton Ellis novel—The bathroom reeks of bleach and disinfectant and the floor is wet and gleaming even though the maid hasn’t started cleaning in here yet; Glamorama, pg. 256—a form of silent violence, an echo of a moment captured in all of its chaos atop a bone white grid, gleaming with gold, surrounded by marble, a porthole into God’s own bathroom…”

“In the second room one finds the fruits of these captured sparks, from sandcastle-makers begotten by Parsons’ great grandfather, beautiful wooden blades with teeth like synthesizer waves and mantis raptorial forelegs, to a golden-ratio finder which teases out the god’s math in anything—a divination device!—to a wooden puzzle of dopamine, which causes the very chemical itself to release via its manipulation.”

“Anna Bogatin had lived in numerous parts of the Soviet Union before moving to America in 1992, a cultural shift reflected in her practice’s blending of the high and low tech. Picture of nature are subjected to digital studies, before being painted painstakingly by hand. The end result is a prismatic abstraction, an infographic of the natural.”